The Republican’s racial culture war is reaching new heights in Virginia | Sidney Blumenthal

Why is the Republican running for governor of Virginia going after Toni Morrison's award-winning novel Beloved?

Running for governor of Virginia as the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin appears to have a split personality - sometimes the generic former corporate executive in a fleece vest, the suburban dad surrounded by his sun-lit children and tail-wagging dogs, and sometimes the fierce kulturkampf warrior and racial dog-whistler. His seemingly dual personality has been filtered through a cascade of Republican consultants' campaign images. His latest TV commercial attempts to resolve the tension by showing him as a concerned father who shares the worries of the ordinary Trumpster. In the closing hours of the campaign, he has exposed that his political identity can't be separated from Republican identity politics in the decadent stage of Trumpism.

The Republican party has long specialized in fabricating esoteric threats, from the basements of Pizzagate to the stratosphere of Jewish space lasers". Youngkin's campaign, though, has contrived a brand-new enemy within, a specter of doom to stir voters' anxieties that only he can dispel: the Black Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved.